*[http://projects.eclipse.org Live instance] for testing and experimentation

*[http://projects.eclipse.org Live instance] for testing and experimentation

Revision as of 16:19, 17 April 2012

In 2011, the Eclipse Foundation began a new effort to replace the existing project management infrastructure--which includes the Developer Portal--with a new unified infrastructure with the intent to make project management activities more consistent and generally easier for all involved.

All-in-one-place. Committers are able to edit information in place on the project information pages. Text/information in one place with links in another is eliminated where possible. Comments and discussion related to reviews, elections, etc. are connected directly to the item being discussed.

Get started faster. By default, projects are provided with a data-driven website that includes consistent links to project releases, reviews, downloads, etc. Projects can opt to override the default and provide their own customized web presence.Setting up a project presence is a matter of configuration, not PHP programming against proprietary APIs.

Links

Projects

Project information pages, which are are used as the primary website by many Eclipse projects, are generated from data provided by project committers. On these pages, you will find useful information such as project description, scope, Bugzilla summaries, commit summaries, lists of repositories, and a multitude of useful links.

All of this information is presented for consumption by the general community.

Users are not required to log in to access information about projects, releases, and many other aspects of the system. But if the user does log in, more options are made available to them.

A logged in user, for example, has the ability to edit information about projects for which they are a member. That is, a project committer, or project lead can edit information about their projects. In this case, an "Edit" option appears.

Clicking "Edit" puts the system into "edit" mode allowing the user to make changes.

All changes are tracked via a built-in revision control system. Other project members can review revisions to see who changed what and when; more usefully, the information can be reverted if mistakes are made.

Note that PMC members and EMO staff members can also make changes to project information (these changes are also tracked).

Releases

At the beginning of a release cycle, projects are required to describe their plans for the release in a project plan. A project plan is expected to evolve somewhat during development on the release. At the end of the release, a project is required to provide retrospective documentation of the release for community review. All of this information is captured and maintained by the Project Management Infrastructure.

The primary benefits of maintaining this information within the system are consistency in how the data is provided, and ease of dissemination. This information is useful and valuable: having it in a format that is easily consumable will mean that it can easily be disseminated to a wide audience.

The "edit" mode for a release provides the ability to set the date and name of the release. Additionally, there are several tab groups of fields to specify a description, project plan items, and review items.

There other benefits of this set up:

Finding and updating this information is consistent and easy; and

By having explicit fields with built-in help text, the committer/project lead providing this data knows exactly what data is required and in what format.

Again, it is assumed that project members will revisit and tweak this information periodically during the development cycle of a release.